The Hindu Business Line : ‘IQ gets you hired, EQ gets you promoted’

What are the factors that play a major role in the success of individuals? Bookish knowledge, academic qualifications, and tech gyan? “Not enough,” say Naresh Purushotham and Lakshmi Kruti Vasan, co-founders of Crestcom India. You would also need a whole set of soft skills, including a positive attitude, and tact in dealing with people, even while being persuasive and motivational, they insist.

Back in 1994, the duo had promoted Counter Point Management Plus, an early franchisee of Crestcom International Asia, to “market and deliver training in the areas of sales, recruiting, customer service and particularly management skills development.”

Each month, thousands of executives and managers from more than 200 major cities in 50-plus countries on six continents participate in Crestcom Training, says www.crestcom.com. “Versions of the training are available in more than 25 languages.”

The English word ‘soft’ often fails to fully impart the depth and potential to the phrase ‘soft skills,’ bemoan Naresh and Lakshmi. Despite that, the phrase has now became an essential tool in every manager’s kit, and even more so, in every would-be-manager’s vocabulary, they add, during a recent interaction with The New Manager, on a leisurely Sunday, across a lunch table.

Crestcom India has worked with companies such as Infosys, ING Vysya, Logica CMG, HCL Technologies, Sundaram Finance, Gemini Communications and Ford Motor Company, inform Naresh and Lakshmi.

However, what can be more important than the fact that these dynamic trainers have already trained about 7,500 managers is the ‘Plus2Plus: BPO for the BOP’ initiative, which is about coaching children from the less-privileged sections of the society into soft skills…Excerpts from the interview, with further inputs gathered over e-mail subsequently.

By calling a programme ‘soft skills’ is there an impression that it can be soft-pedalled?

In a way yes! In most organisations, when a hard skills programme is announced, there are enough and more employees wanting to sign up. But when a soft skills programme is announced, the HR (human resources) or training folks would have to cajole employees to attend. Usually the ones with no work are asked to attend!

The leadership must set an example here – we find that in companies where the top leaders themselves attend a soft skills programme, the rest of the organisation follows suit. Perhaps we should stop calling the programme ‘soft skills’ and instead call it ‘critical skills’ or ‘life skills’!

Are ‘soft skills’ universally talked about, or is it more emphasised in India?

We can trace the origin of the phrase ‘soft skills’ to the US. Also known as attitudinal training, this gathered momentum in the early 1960s and 70s with many motivational gurus like Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar. A great believer of soft skills was Andrew Carnegie, the great steel magnate.

Wide acceptance of soft skills in India is a fairly recent phenomenon particularly with the advent of the IT (information technology) and ITeS (IT enabled services) sectors. In fact, the ‘employability gap’ that industry leaders talk about, refers essentially to the lack of ‘soft skills’ in our college graduates.

Let’s not forget: IQ (intelligence quotient) gets you hired but EQ (emotional quotient) gets you promoted. Soft skills are all about EQ or emotional intelligence.

So, who needs ‘soft skills’ more – the staff or the managers?

Certainly both! However, the managers, being the role models, need to demonstrate soft skills first. Soft skills are important across the board at all levels – the only difference being that the type of soft skills and the amount of training required would vary from level to level.

Is training essential for India? We already have the cost advantage…

In the context of India emerging as an economic superpower, a huge manpower shortage is envisaged. Additionally, organisations are already facing an acute shortage of middle management.

Employees literally need to be trained and groomed in a hurry to meet these gaps. If India needs to shake off the ‘cost arbitrage’ tag it must develop more managers and leaders. And this can only come about by exposing our people to world-class training.

What is the most important problem that you face while training?

Hesitation among Indian managers to delegate is the most important problem. They rather prefer to micromanage. Reasons could be many: a carry-over of the traditional joint family system, or the pre-liberalisation era when control and hierarchy were in vogue. Today, in the knowledge era, empowerment is the mantra. The younger generation is well-equipped and is ready to take risks and make mistakes faster. They are hungry for growth. Delegation is no longer an option. Managers are more like coaches guiding from behind.

This carries forward to the area of succession planning as well because corporate leaders need to groom their successors well ahead. Jack Welch for example, had identified three possible successors and worked with them for two-three years before the time came to name the final candidate.

Is there a balance between soft and hard skills?

As a broad guideline we would suggest that the junior/fresher levels need 80 per cent focus on functional/tech/product knowledge and a 20 per cent focus on soft skills. At the middle, it is more like 50-50.

At the top, the accent changes dramatically: 80 per cent would be strategic/leadership/emotional intelligence and about 20 per cent would be conceptual updates of technology/product innovation/M&A/finance strategies, etc.

Your clients include a lot of IT companies. Cognizant, Subex Azure, iSoft… Has rupee appreciation hit training budgets?

Rupee appreciation will impact any business that is into exports – top of the list being IT and ITeS organisations.

On the face of it, it looks like training budgets may get impacted since profit margins are going to shrink.

However, the larger entities such as Cognizant and Wipro are not cutting back on their training initiatives. Our guess is that employees would need to be trained and developed even more in this context because if the organisation has to move up the value chain from being mere coders to consultants, they would need to invest in training to give their employees the much-needed inputs for value-adding.

Tell us about your ‘Bullet Proof’ programme.

To answer this, we must begin with the question, ‘How do managers become managers?’ Crestcom International did research to seek answers to this question. It spoke to over 1,400 CEOs and /senior executives and the answers were the following: 1) employees good in their current job got promoted (for example, a good sales person becomes a sales manager, or a good engineer becomes a production manager); 2) seniority or experience in the field; 3) academic qualifications; 4) entrepreneurial calling; and 5) network (knowing the right people in the right places).

Once we got this information, we went on to ask our next question: ‘What do managers do, as their day-to-day routine?’ Again, speaking to the same senior executives, we found they were typically involved in motivating the people, leading their team-mates, delegating, negotiating, communicating – all the traditional skills required of a manager.

Surprisingly, when we asked the next question as to ‘how much training does a manager get in each of the skills,’ the answer we got was: “Not much”. That is how the concept of the ‘Bullet Proof’ manager came into being – to address the gap in management skills.

What are the strengths of the ‘Bullet Proof’ manager programme?

Broadly, it has six advantages. Firstly, a global programme featuring some of the top trainers by using the video-based live facilitated model. Then comes, a comprehensive programme that allows the managers to get a well-rounded perspective to contemporary management skills and practices. Thirdly, behavioural training is a process and not an event. Therefore, the programme is spread across 12 sessions over 12 months. On course for creating accountability, we ask the participants to share their knowledge with their direct reports. Fifth, the programme ensures continuous learning by allowing the organisations to own the course material including the DVDs used by the facilitator/ and providing web access.

Lastly, once enrolled, we allow participants to participate in the programme wherever they are in the world. The programme is offered in more than 55 countries.

So the managers have to go to you?

Not exactly. Our programme has multiple delivery models. A public seminar provides an opportunity where managers from different companies participate. We also have the ‘customised version’ where the programme is offered exclusively to a corporate after understanding its critical requirements. The third delivery model is the licensing model. This is where the corporate would require training for more than 500 managers, as in Wipro Technologies, for example.

Attrition has been a major issue for tech companies. What is the role of the manager in employee retention?

Gallup has been saying for a while now that ‘people join organisations but leave managers/supervisors/bosses.’ This makes it very clear that every manager plays a critical role in retaining his or her staff. If the manager is a role model, is committed to the growth of his/her staff, is involved with them, and is honest and transparent in all dealings, who would want to leave such a manager? We all have experienced both good and bad managers in our careers. Unmistakably, a good manager is a great asset to any organisation.

Tell us about your BPO for BOP initiative.

We are working with the principals of schools in and around Anna Nagar and Mogappiar, initially, to identify children who have scored 60 per cent or above in their tenth standard and are continuing with their education.

The children are chosen from the lower economic section (with the family’s monthly salary not exceeding Rs 5,000), as in the case of rickshaw-pullers, auto-drivers, housemaids, construction workers, and so forth.

The programme, spread over two years, has four classes per month in Plus-1, and two classes per month in Plus-2. Our focus is on communication, personality development, computer skills, career counselling, resume writing and attending interviews.

The training programme is designed to be interactive with lots of games, exercises and role-plays that would not only sustain the child’s interest throughout the two-year period but also ensure retention of knowledge and skills.

Corporate trainers deliver the programme with state-of-the-art teaching aids in an air-conditioned hi-tech environment. Each class has no more than twenty students, to ensure personal attention for each student. The first batch of students, numbering about 120, will be available for placement by mid-2008. The second batch is also on.

Is there a shelf life for training?

As long as learning is a three-pronged activity – learning-unlearning-relearning – there is no shelf life for training. In a ‘Google world,’ where there is an explosion of information, just-in-time learning and continuous updating are even more relevant today than at any other point in human history.

But there can be over-training…

Yes, there can be over training! We know a few organisations where employees ‘suffer’ from too much training. This typically happens when there is a mechanical training calendar and employees must log in ‘hours’ or ‘man days’ of training – also when there are too many initiatives happening at the same time.

We believe that training is not a panacea for all evils! It is one spoke in the organisation wheel and it works only when all the other spokes are in place.

For example, there is no point in training when there are systemic issues that need to be addressed. No amount of training can set right an environment where there is dictatorship and hierarchy! It would only lead to more cynics in the organisation.

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